Too young to recall David Steinberg doing stand-up, brilliantly? Showtime invites you to play
catch-up tonight with
Quality Balls: The David Steinberg Story.

In his stand-up days from the late 1960s to the early ’80s, Steinberg set himself apart from
other comedians.

Young and handsome (his untamed unibrow and slight overbite notwithstanding), he had a certain
narrative way of telling a joke.

Instead of doing a setup leading to a punch line, Steinberg would just tell a story, dropping a
funny reference into the middle of a sentence and then moving on, adding more funny bits — all
delivered in a deceptively conversational style.

Emerging from the famed Second City improv-comedy troupe (the petri dish for talents such as
Alan Arkin, Dan Aykroyd, John Belushi, John Candy, Barbara Harris, Robert Klein and Fred Willard),
Steinberg told jokes about God. Well, not God exactly. But the rabbi’s son — who left his native
Winnipeg, Canada, to study at a yeshiva and at the University of Chicago — knew his Bible, and it
became the source of his “sermons.”

Steinberg’s routines weren’t sacrilegious, but they were seen as such by CBS, for one, which
canceled
The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour after Tommy Smothers ignored the network’s edict that
Steinberg not be allowed to do one of his sermons again.

NBC didn’t seem to have the same problems with Steinberg, but that might have been in part
because Steinberg’s champion was the king of late-night TV, Johnny Carson, who had him on
The Tonight Show 130 times — second only to the number of appearances by Bob Hope.

More often than not, Steinberg, who was inspired to leave the University of Chicago to try
stand-up after seeing Lenny Bruce, got away with things that other comics couldn’t. One reason was
that he was boyishly handsome and seemingly guileless. Another was that his material was far more
intellectual than that of the standard borscht-belt comic. He probably just outsmarted network
censors, although having Carson in his corner didn’t hurt.

After Burt Reynolds hired him to direct the 1981 film
Paternity, Steinberg weaned himself off stand-up and became a director whose resume
includes TV greats such as
Curb Your Enthusiasm,
Designing Women,
The Golden Girls,
Mad About You,
Newhart and
Seinfeld.

Since 2012, he has hosted Showtime’s
Inside Comedy, which will kick off its third season tonight with Steinberg chatting up
Jimmy Fallon and Zach Galifianakis.

It’s great to see Steinberg, 71, performing again at the La Jolla Playhouse as a kind of framing
device for Barry Avrich’s skillfully directed documentary.

His hair is gray and he seems to have finally tamed that pesky unibrow, but his comic
sensibilities are undiminished. That’s why guys such as Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld not only go
to him to direct their shows but see him as one of the pioneers of contemporary stand-up
comedy.